Re-invigorating the photo album: augmenting printed photobooks with digital media

Abstract

The photo album emerged in the late 1800s as place to collect portrait photos of visitors to a home, and was later appropriated by Kodak as a visual chronology of family history. With digital photography, the album has largely been replaced by online repositories of images shared on social media, and the selective printing of photobooks. In this paper, we present a ‘next-generation paper’ authoring system for annotating photobooks with multimedia content viewed on a nearby smartphone. We also report the results of a trial of this system, by nine travellers who used it to make augmented photobooks following a trip. These findings show that the augmented physical-and-digital photobook can heighten awareness of the multisensory aspects of travel, enrich memories, and enhance social interaction around photos. The social and technical implications for the future of the photo album are discussed.